Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

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I have read every biography on Sylvia Plath's life that I could find having been a big fan of the poet since my university days in the 1970's.With the passing of Ted and Olwyn Hughes it seems that some of the material previously restricted by the family has been unlocked. As a result this book seems to offer a more balanced view on the relationship between these two legendary poets and their immediate family and friends.Too many earlier biographies have been forced to rely on limited material, or even worse, have been designed to fit a specific perspective. They tend to be too one-sided, written by through a specific lens; often demonizing Ted H. for his infidelity and as a result presenting a very one-sided opinion of Sylvia's suicide, making her out to be a hapless victim.Dr. Clark delves into her life before her marriage, and while not a biography on Ted Hughes, it provides an important overview of who he was and how he interacted with Sylvia in both the ups and downs of the relationship.Heather Clark presents a round, multi-viewed vision of the two lives of these poets together, making it clear that it takes two to tango, even if it only takes one to die.When I purchased the book, I thought that a 937 page biography on someone who only lived for 30 years would be stuffed with superfluous filler. It isn't!The author indulges in extensive research which took her years. The result is review of a life that makes you feel you knew the poetess personally and had been exposed to everyone of significance in her orbit.Aside from writing a well balanced, detailed and very non-judgemental biography, Dr. Clark suggests that in the future more documents will likely come to light, allow future biographers to build on her work. It is nice to see a biographer that acknowledges that hers may not be the definitive one.There is so much in this biography that it is impossible to cover the many perspectives. Having worked in the field of mental health for 30 years, I found Dr. Clark's analysis of the psychiatric profession during the 60s and 70's provided a very important perspective on the life story.If you are a fan of Sylvia Plath's poetry and want to get an overview of the post-war literary period in the U.S. and U.K. this book is an absolute must!

Wow. This book...I'm a huge devotee of all things Sylvia. Since college, she seems to come in and out of my life in spans where I become hugely involved with her work. A few months ago was one of those times, where I had both her Letters and her Unabridged Journals open in my lap, going back and forth to try to get the full picture. (I eventually abandoned the letters because they were a sunshine-y front for the reality portrayed in her journals.) I then decided to embark upon a deep dive into poem analysis. No poetry scholar am I, but I had a good time marking up my copies of Ariel and Collected Poems with my own thoughts. As if I were trying to get closer to this incredible artist any way I could.And then came Heather Clark's incredible biography. Clark--who IS a poetry scholar--has provided the ultimate synthesis between letters, journals, and poetry, so that we see Sylvia as a whole person, by her own words and remembrances of those who knew her best. Clark had read and interviewed every one of SP's surviving contemporaries to paint the most complete picture of the brilliant SP in all her facets--the good, the bad, and the ultra resilient--and to give us a clearer picture of her last, desperate days.Notably absent from her acknowledgements is Frieda Hughes who has adopted a defensive stance with regard to SP history, likely to protect her father. And with good cause. It's clear Clark did her due diligence to try to remain impartial with regards to the drama of the SP/Ted Hughes mythology, letting the players speak their own lines instead of adding her speculation. The effect is a pretty stark confirmation that Ted Hughes didn't, up to his own death, take responsibility for his behavior.To be clear, he's not responsible for SP's suicide. His betrayal, the coldest winter, caring alone for two small children, illness, the threat of being re-institutionalized when botched shock treatment from ten years before still haunted her...It all culminated in a perfect storm. As she wrote in Edge, her last poem,We have come so far. It is over.But TH was reckless and careless with SP's heart. His partner in life and art was suddenly reduced to a jailer who kept him imprisoned, as if she'd coerced the vows out of his mouth. Clark shares in detail the symbiotic relationship between SP and TH and gives him full credit for taking on childcare to let SP write in a time where that was unheard of. But his actions in the last six months of SP's life reveal a man who suddenly decided, upon meeting Assia Wevill--a married woman--that his entire 6 year marriage with SP was a constricting prison that had prevented him from creating. Never mind that she is the reason anyone knows who he is.At face value, separated from SP, his poetry isn't all that good. "The Thought-Fox" is one of his best known works but I can't get past the juvenile title and the trite patness of the poem itself. Birthday Letters reads more like short essays, some banal, peppered with some pretty imagery. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1998 but honestly did anyone rush out to buy it because TH wrote it, or because the poems were about Sylvia? By his own words, he'd be fly fishing off a rock in Australia and not Poet Laureate if not for her diligence in getting him published. It's not overstating to say he owes her his career, but the second he lays eyes on Assia, his marriage to SP was forfeit and the life she helped build came crumbling down. In the last weeks of her life, he treats her poorly, dangling reconciliation in her face while taking on a second mistress at the same time.TH didn't "murder" SP as some feminist poets attest, but his cavalier disregard for her pain (pain that he knew and wrote about and sold in the Birthday poems, where he tries to pin the bulk of her anguish on her father) speaks to a poor character. As does the fact he moved into SP's London flat with his pregnant mistress after SP had paid the rent for a year. Or how he blamed Mistress #2 for him potentially missing a phone call from SP in her last, desperate hours.But to sum up Sylvia as merely reflections of the men in her life is to actually do her disservice. Clark avoids playing up the salacious and the dramatic, but reveals the woman in all her flawed glory, as genius driven to make something of herself in a time when women weren't expected to make more than dinner and babies. SP is inspiring and special, not because of her suicide or earlier attempt, but for what she endured up to that breaking point. The pressures society slammed down on her, and her own perfectionism that drove her so hard.As Clark stated in her forward, her goal was to remove SP from the mythos of suicide and feminist icon, and portray her as a whole person, and she's succeeded marvelously. By letting the players in SP's life speak in their own words, the clearest and most definitive account of this remarkable artist's life has now been written. It incorporates every aspect of SP and adds insightful poetic analysis, as it's in her poetry wherein her true voice lies. SP's Ariel poems, as Clark illustrates, were not "about" TH or her father solely--to believe that is to give those men too much credit, and erase the misogynistic post-war, post-Holocaust, Cold War-threat-of-annihilation-world in which she lived and worked. She is raging against it all, scraping herself raw and doing it bravely, with cold-stiff fingers at 4am, before the babies wake.I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat, as they raced like the Ariel arrow, toward the suicidal eye of inevitability. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull SP out of that cold, snow-choked flat and put her on her Nauset beach, warm and sun-filled, so she might heal. She was only 30 years old. In the past, I'd been saddened by that loss of so many years' worth of her words and art. After closing Clark's book, I felt a kind of grief for the lost woman. Clark has elevated Sylvia Plath from icon, artist and poet, and showed her as a pure human being, who fought to rise out of the societal prisons that sought to trap her.If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.No, let's not desert her, but remember her for her mind, her talent, her art, and her resilience. Not for her final act. It was the period at the end of her sentence, not the beginning of her story.

Ótimo livro. Letra com um bom tamanho e papel creme. Papel sem textura, bem liso.Comprei a versão em capa comum por ser melhor para manusear, afinal são mais de mil páginas. Super recomendo!

This is by a country mile the best book on the subject; a few books have been written about the tragic poet, and I have read many of them. While I am not a native speaker, i can only encourage any german reader to dare to go for this, as the author writes with fantastic insight, new sources, a fresh view and a distant yet sympethetic look onto Plath. Plath of course committed suicide way before i was even born, but as this book impressively demonstrates, not all was - and maybe is? - told about her. Def a book not to be missed.

This is the most comprehensive and objective biography of Plath I have read in a long time and much use has been made of new information revealed in the recently published complete letters, the Harriet Rosenstein archive, and the author’s own research. Previous biographies such as Bitter Fame by Ann Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes were too obviously biased towards Ted Hughes, while others portray Plath as a passive victim of Hughes. This biography is honest about the faults and virtues of both Hughes and Plath. Sylvia Plath is not portrayed as a plaster saint victimised by Hughes but as a very determined and tenacious person who did not suffer fools and expected the same perfectionistic high standards of others as she did of herself. Bad boys thrilled and excited her, and she was something of a masochist in that respect. She enjoyed a sexually sadistic relationship with Richard Sassoon and found a perfect substitute for him in Hughes when Sassoon dumped her in France. The choice of the wild, sexually virile and poetically gifted Hughes as her life partner rather than nice boys such as the safe and conventional Dick Norton or Gordon Lameyer was a big gamble, one that she was more than willing to take, for the sake of her art. She was more than a match for Hughes and thought she could handle or ‘manage’ him. Plath was ‘one very tough lady’ and deliberately pursued the life of a mother and writer with all the insecurity and juggling of domestic responsibilities that entailed. She was no feminist and yet was determined to ‘have it all’. She wanted lots of babies and to cook for her man at the same time as she wanted to be a prolific artist. The gamble paid off in terms of her art and she remains one of the most famous women poets of all time, but the consequences for her personal life were disastrous.